How Can AI Enable Faster Marketing Decisions?
As an AI marketer, this topic is very close to my heart. Over the years, I have had a front-row seat to AI-led transformation in the marketing ecosystem. At the heart of this transformation is the new, discreet consumer who demands personalization. 3 out of 4 global consumers expect businesses to truly understand their needs and expectations. AI empowers marketers with data analytics from social media, emails, and the web in a relatively shorter timeframe, making the technology indispensable for evolved, on the ball marketers. And this technology is moving at a swift pace. It is up to marketers – my tribe – to make the most of what is possible with AI.
Faster and better – a new world of personalization awaits marketers
The thing about AI is that it makes marketing automation far more intelligent than ever before. What this means on ground is that the technology translates data into decisions. With AI and predictive analytics, marketers have a newfound ability to leverage vast volumes of data to foretell consumer action and outcomes. Businesses around the world are using predictive analytics to understand the new-age consumer holistically. This enables them to deliver campaigns, messaging, and creatives quickly and effectively, optimizing rapidly during campaign flight. In addition, organizations like Starbucks and McDonald’s are personalizing user experience even at the point of purchase. Just recently, McDonald’s announced that it would personalize menu boards at drive-throughs. The dynamically changing menu board would take into consideration factors influencing diners’ decisions. This is the level at which AI has helped brands befriend their customers and provide meaningful, outcome-based experiences.
Chatbots- AI enables effective 1:1 brand-consumer interactions
Have you had conversations with brand chatbots that felt genuinely human? I, for one, am amazed every day at how intelligent chatbots have become lately! From HDFC’s Eva to Shell’s Shelly, organizations worldwide are leveraging conversational AI to deliver intuitive and responsive 1:1 engagement with customers. These chatbots are trained over time to identify needs and provide services and recommendations to customers, bringing the power of the human touch to online conversations. More importantly, they deliver this human touch without human error and delays. What’s not to love?
Dollar and cent business outcomes, now enabled by AI
None of these transformations would have been possible had AI not delivered on its ROI promise. Outcome-conscious marketers are leveraging AI to design truly result-focused campaigns and experiences for their customers. The role of AI spans throughout the marketing lifecycle, from segmentation to campaign delivery. It makes targeting and activations more data-driven, thus ensuring high business outcomes from marketing interventions.
Can humans and AI collaborate in the new-age marketing ecosystem?
The next milestone in leveraging AI in marketing would be to invent a concerted decision-making process. According to Gartner, this can happen in three distinct stages – decision support, decision augmentation, and decision automation- to pursue faster, more consistent, adaptable, and high-quality decisions at scale.
To truly leverage the power of AI in marketing, humans, and technology must work collaboratively. The roles are well defined. Humans enhance decision-making with ethics and principles, emotions, experience, logic, and reasoning. AI delivers decision support mechanisms such as data and alerts, visualizations, and exploration. Similarly, humans and AI have distinct roles to play across decision augmentation and automation. Therefore, organizations must prepare for the powerful twins – humans and AI – to act collaboratively across the lifecycle to enable true technology transformation in marketing.
The time for the twins to take charge is well and truly here, and I could not be more excited about what the future holds!
The author is Tanu Verma, Head of Global Marketing, Affine
